Category: light

admit, openly

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
—Gabriel Garcia Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude

28 Jan 2012.130pm. Oakland, CA. photo by edward atlee

Send me your questions in written form so that I can see your thoughts in advance of my response. I want to see your intuition mapped out fine as the Saharan sand that now drifts inside the borders of France. To reclaim and to consider that our own personal horizons are simply a fated line of slow-moving clouds evolving into spontaneous prayer or recognizing the speaker’s voice is coming from inside you. In this story, we must learn when to interrupt and when to no longer be polite. When the speaker realizes it their turn to show up and be the hero. Beneath the froth and fury, a reflexive style of aversion to perceived risk, we will ride out the drama organized before we were even born. I must admit what I really want is to see the body formed from your words.

what you deserve

“I do not force myself, ever…I have regard for the inner voice.”
—Lee Krasner (1977)

August 2019, Oakland, CA

Genocide, immolation, massacre, breaking news,
poetic language, one million acres. Plan for the futures
in front of us and don’t look too far back.
There is nothing there. Just begging for mercy,
for immunity, for more than you deserve.

The bus is a warm refuge. Foggy windows blur
still naked trees. I trust their knowledge
on when to show up. A sky threatens collapse
and still a rainbow appears. Like that
kind of majesty. That kind of being in witness.

In sensuous fuzzed-out light,
I was held long enough to be astonished.
All this dedication textures delicate.
Fresh consciousness. In this flex,
my ears are open and eyes quiet.

memory as ___

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe,
during a pause, at a comma.
—Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Mankinholes Methodist Chapel, Todmorden, England, 1975. Martin Parr

When the physical form of a dream becomes a body:
___daffodils announce closure as a thesis
___shawls of fog expand into what was unseen
___memory becomes a choice of endurance or loss
___release blooms into the shape of an open fist
___curious, dull moving light is radical devotion

resurrection

The miraculous is everywhere and in everything. Waiting for us to notice it. Waiting for us to appreciate it. Waiting for us to love it.
—Kobi Yamada, Noticing

Dec 2023, Oakland, CA _ photo by edward atlee

We moved a lot growing up.
There was no logic
to the dynamic loops:
only uproot and start again.

I learned how to memorize
places instead of people.
Absorbing landscapes by relearning
the way a sun found a room and
trusting seasons as my calendar
to digest thresholds of familiarity.

And here?
I seek forested paths back home.

prologue

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. ― Mary Oliver

Richard Kalvar. Woman looking at herself in store window. New York City. 1969.

Winter light hits different here.
Golden hour now has a margin.

Still, I’ve been here,
or a version of it, before.

As the recent past fades into fragile oscillations, I wait for a new bus
on a new street to and from a new job in a new town.

In the deluge of new slants and in between
breaks of fast-moving clouds,
I too embrace the unpredictable.

close your eyes

It was not a war.
It was people.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, “It is not a game, it was never a game”

from THEY LIVE (1988), director John Carpenter

It was only a month ago. The setting sun, around 6:15pm, illuminated the golden crowns of the majestic oaks below. Now, a few defiant leaves hang loosely in a 5:30pm darkness.

I thought about the phrase “threatening clouds” to explain the immediate energy found in ordinary language. I had been influenced by Kay Ryan’s essay “Derichment” a few days prior to observing how early winter sunsets’ slow movement down Mandana Blvd was all in present tense. Ryan wrote: “There are ways in which pleasures become deeper when they are repeated.” It was the consistency of pattern seeking; a divining rod, of sorts.

Agnès Geoffray, sans titre from Incidental Gestures series (2012)

It wasn’t exactly participatory if you never said no.

A theory: hands tight around throats force a mutual feeling of enlightenment. I saw planets shining bright even in all that light pollution. Somewhere, a cleaved iceberg floats south unaware of its significance to the project of witness. Volume has multiple meanings. So does martyr.

As you told me stories of your life, you let a wasp kiss
your open lips. Held in both fear and in raptured fascination,

I closed my eyes to feel something new.

when the line breaks

We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.

—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”

personal screen capture from film, DERRIDA

*

What calls me this morning is dark matter.

It proves its own existence by showing up.

**

Interred is in the news, again.

Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.

***

In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:

      • There were no people here before us.
      • We made this place useful.
      • Our destiny is unbought.
      • You belong here.

****

This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.

Apologies are evidence: absent presence.

*****

The sky is percussive.

Rain falls in delight.

******

There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.

Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?

The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.

*******

Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.

Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.

Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.

how we transcend

What is left after the essence has departed?
—Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

John Hyde Phillips. Bobbing For Apples (detail from Saturday Evening Post cover, 30 October 1943)

Two men speak loudly about numbers as proxy
for success. The loudest lectures on “execution”.

They both agree scope is a form of worship,
which they named “synergy”.

I notice trees are slowly undressing themselves.
Even light sheds, abstract in its positive expectation.

Another war; more rage. Drones and rumor blush bright.
When impulsive is reparative, fear is sacrifice.

Two women discuss leaving an abusive partner.
One quietly asks the other: “Does god exist?”

I almost mistake the lure of absolution as pleasure.

dive towards the light

Forgiveness is letting go of all hopes for a better past.
—Lily Tomlin

Katrien de Blauwer

Imagine a river flowing north towards ancient coniferous forests.
If you are into unbinding desire, you’ll understand the reference.
This immense verdant abundance is a secret hoard of light.
It is a felt experience where light casts both warm and shadow.
The machine logic of algorithmic propaganda will not understand this.
We swallow the discipline of seasonal change and its nostalgia—
the purpose of death unfolding before our eyes with brilliant fascination.
In this portal of harvest and grief, we remember why even the gods rest.
What remains in the graduating darkness is a promise of something better.

make a wish

The German word for sea is meer and more
is mehr. Residue, residual, knowing difference.

—Madhur Anand, “Satyagraha in Tübingen”

pre-dawn, Point Reyes, CA (December 29, 2016)

Maybe this will clear things up:
even our galaxy is filled with corpses.
Dead stars make for obsolete
maps and unmoored gravity
along with other tricks of perception.
What persists is memory,
which tends to isolate itself.
Essentially, no one is home.

It’s the light, still emitting,
that we diligently remember
and direct our wishes towards.
That feeling of possibility—an appetite.

waiting for you

I try to calculate the time it takes to scratch these words. Thoughts fade and flare. Ink across the paper registers a kind of time theft during which I fictionalize an ongoing present, the ever-elusive me, you, here, and there, all existing somehow in a slightly fraudulent now.

—Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

David Graham, West Quincy, MO, 1993

An ache, August slides through us. Anger is a desire.
To be over, to feel done. It’s exhausting to be inside this repetition.

But there are people to love as dirty dishes sit waiting in the sink.
You suggested I seek forgiveness—self—and absence—perspective.

I felt ambitious in the suspense and tried to relax my anxious heart.
I waited for the world, for the arc to return to a luminous point.

As reference, I believe love is best when it is enduring—
steady as starlight or accountability and September light.

Notice who is around you; who shows up.
What will be left in this new space is courage.

daisy chain

NO UMPIRES NO MANAGERS (Oakland, CA, December 2022)

There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.

—Mary Szybist, “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly” from Granted

¬

In tricked-out light, I wait.
Impatient and in longing
for a tipping point—
when I can believe the score
my body has been faithfully keeping
all these years
is enough.

When I am able to touch
that sweet edge of possible—
where I am, in holy fact, good enough.
Where brutal memory,
now committed muscle,
concentrates into rebellion.

I listen for wisdom
just beyond the loudest voices.
I hear only questions
like how does scarcity show up
for those who only know how to take.

When sounds of man and their magnitudes
of scale are casually removed
from equations of their own destruction
only bright, sacred ache
is left in its wake.

Remembering, again,
that I must hold space
for what was once unbroken and good.
For without this ritual of justice,
I risk becoming corrupt—
endlessly looping
into lulled measure and conditioned response.

mean feelings

we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves
—Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories 

Ikko Kagari from Pervert Rush

Technically, my shadow is shorter in the summer. All that light absorbs.

I, as audience, am distracted and bored. I recognize how my obsessive seasonal observations are necessary in this never-ending series of California summers. This persistent consistency starts to feel unrecognizable as ignoring rising heat signatures on concrete. Not unlike how the ultra wealthy call interactions with other humans “touch points”. It’s more like the theory that black holes have been singing for billions of years.  The darkness around us is deep vibe.

I can’t afford the apps that sell healing frequencies by the hertz.

Venus is currently retrograde in Leo, which echoes the apparent motion set in late summer of 2015. It was not the first summer you disappeared in dramatic fashion. Yet another resurrection with the burden resting on proof of return. I told no one to act as if it never happened. I was like the California sun—indifferent to the calendar season.

Our collective horrors are not equal. Neither are the songs we sing to self-soothe. Instead, teach me the wonder of your despair without ever touching me. Listen to my empty hands.

annotations

“…I wanted to propose writing as a material manifestation, an embodiment, of desire for reality.”
—Lyn Hejinian

Screenshot from They Live (1988) dir. John Carpenter

Eventually, I could no longer swallow the tension.
Clouds held brightness while leaves fell like stars.

Unmeasurable: the patience of a ripening orange.
By all estimates, I am failing.

The idea of references are spacial.
A Farmer’s Almanac predicts an endless summer.

Strokes of lines turn a phrase.
Waiting in the shadows, salvation.

the cast of its shape is recognizable

“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
—Robert M. Pirsig

Screenshot from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Werner Herzog (1974)

A summer sun lurks behind the marine layer.
Patient ambient light indicates scale
and relation. What is arriving?
What counts is the hope. That demand
to experience a transformation.
Revelations of perception
act as units of active witness
after past lives fade.
The sensation of an idea—
like walking on green plastic lawns.

receiving horizon

photographer: unknown

You insisted on an open casket. Hard proof, evidence of generous witness.
I remember it was rhubarb season, early spring, and your absence
deepened the long shadows laying gently across your receiving body.
Lilies (yellow, your favorite color) and fresh cut dandelions,
still dripping defensive sticky milk, held the light of your horizon.
Your life’s silhouette now full circle. Our mutual failures
vanished into pedantic memories and obscured the reverent silence.

I force myself to swallow the always-disappearing now.

There is pleasure in this remembrance, a type of muscle memory,
while I actively grope for a future. Even this specific meaning-making,
if shockingly ordinary, is superstitious in its suffering.
I’ve learned to gather these blurred edges, glints of everyday living,
as gravity compliments a recursive temptation towards animality.

making time

Deity is in the details & we are details among other details & we long to be

Teased out of ourselves. And become all of them.

—Larry Levis, “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand”

Rinko Kawauchi
Rinko Kawauchi

When I am able, I sink slowly.
Shadowed in warm marigold sun,
I shed my skin and all its identities:
scripts, claws, bruises.
I felt nothing sinister, just adrenaline
from knowing I was doing something wrong.
An ambivalent refrain—courageous as an eclipse—
pure movement vanishing into exhalation.

pigeonhole (gossip)

“The absurd does not liberate; it binds.” —Albert Camus

I WANNA LIVE, Berlin (October 2017)

I catch a rainbow in my hand.
You remind me that even in stillness
light breaks sound. I take that fracture
and bury it deep inside myself.
I want my darkness to mean something.
You stand desperate. The concept of “self”
broadens into a flattened “we”. Self-appointed,
I anoint you and under faith’s observation
we begin to believe we matter.

uncommitted

“March, all that deceptive light but no fruits yet.” —Talvikki Ansel,
from “16 Stanzas in February,” Field (no. 98, Spring 2018).

d Robert Doisneau. Pedestrians Looking at Painting of a Nude in Paris Antique Shop Window, 1948.

In the kitchen, light disarms domesticity. If you know, it is the same indistinguishable process as Mt. Tam’s cleaving iterations in the golden hour light. Always with breakneck speed. A world without material things, maybe more anti-internet, and certainly like the undead. This buried architecture of alleged domination, and its long-term partner submission, are binary witness to a blueprint of only translated secrets. The light resting inside corners, its own container of space and structure—mathematics,  hypocrisy, or anxiety of memory—ensures that all our futures wait rushed and uncommitted. Swallow the miracle of ritual. Startling in its immediacy.

near the end of time

It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

—last 4 lines of “Vermeer”, Tomas Tranströmer (trans. by Robert Bly)

From Double Reward series (2021), Max Pinckers

I was straddled, briefly, inside a space hollow with intent.
My clarity took the shape of a human-shaped hole.
Repetition became remembrance. Bright angles broke the plane.
I remember the camellias were dropping as headlines portend
false security. In this dreamed reality, sorrow penetrated remorse.
Something moved sideways as if in confession. At this edge,
just beyond, nothing. Blank imagination untangled into simple objects.
I heard balloon, small car, bus. I saw light dancing as if a whetstone.
Starlight hissed sharp. My hands held my face like a bell jar.
Wherever I was, my gravity kissed itself goodbye. I was an entire creation.
Light and shadow and universe.

counting light

Can’t quite get to the sound…
— See You at The Movies, J  Mascis

Untitled, Holland, MI 2015, Victoria Crayhon

Between us and god—
open mouth, open paw—
we count the seconds
inside a clap of thunder
and crack of lightening.
Someone spills a prayer—
blushes of winter sun—
troubled by the quiet break
in diminishing sound.
That switch to without—
pause, absence—
eclipses the gathering light.

shadows

“I am attracted to the ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence.” —Louise Glück

Western winter light, January 2015

At their deepest hibernation, groundhogs slow their heartbeats
to three to five beats per minute. Dangerously efficient.
Orange blossoms take almost a year to resemble fruit.
Did you notice when the undulations became ritual?
When time, found in the sound of light, was earnest and seductive?